Ernie asks:

> My twelve-year-old daughter wouldn't sleep in her
>  bed because she saw a spider and was told by her
>  teacher that we eat spiders when we sleep.  (I asked
>  her the name of that teacher, so we could "chat", but
>  she declined for fear of embarrassment).
>
>  My almost sixteen-year-old daughter concurred with
>  her younger sister.
>
>  I tried to convince them, but it was like talking to,
>  well, two young girls.
>
>  I can find nothing on the net do debunk their story.
>
>  Is this a legend, or a fact?

I can't say anything about frequencies, but I can say with absolute certainty
that I have observed it occur in one instance.

I and three hundred of my closest friends earned our way through college
going door-to-door tracking the earliest form of geodesic and navigational
satellites in the early 1960's (see:

     http://aics-research.com/history1.html )

The picture in the page above is of me of Guam in 1964. In 1965, I spent the
year on American Samoa doing the same thing. Samoa is a magnificiently pretty
place, but it has all of the attraction of being trapped in a closet for a
year.

Because satellite tracking is a 24-hour business, among the five kids that
were assigned to the station, at least one or two were always sleeping. Of
those on the island at the time, my best friend and the person I held in
highest regard was Nelson Franklin. Nelson is now a professional civil
engineer with his own engineering practice in Anchorage, AK. He's in the
phone book, so you can call him if you wish and verify this story.

On Samoa, during the second half of our time therek, we lived in a concrete
cinderblock building with a concrete floor, with absolutely no furniture in
it. We slept on the concrete floor, using either newspapers or banana leaves
stuffed beneath a woven mat to make the floor a little softer.

If you weren't working or sleeping, there wasn't a heck  there wasn't a heck
of a lot to do on the island. I read three hundred books during my tenure
there, sometimes five a day. It was on Samoa that I convinced myself that
reading fiction served the same the purpose as getting drunk. It was merely a
temporary escape from reality.

One day, as was the case on a great many other days, we, the non-working,
non-sleeping few, adopted the standard posture, sitting on the concrete floor
with our backs to the wall, with our arms wrapped around our legs, just
sitting there quietly for hours around the edge of the room while Nelson
slept in the center of the room.

We all noticed that a very large spider had crawled up onto Nelson's face,
but no one said a word. When the spider got next to his mouth, Nelson went
"slurp" and immediately swallowed the spider. We all exploded in laughter and
Nelson woke up. We told him what happened, but he wasn't sure that he
believed any of us, but he didn't go back to sleep either.

That was sometime in the summer of 1965, but I'm sure that Nelson remembers
the story just as clearly as I do, or at least the second half of it.

Wirt Atmar

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